The Mother

A Novel (The Good Lands)

By: B.L. Blanchard

Narrated by: Fleur de Wit

Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

Dragon Award for Best Speculative Fiction Nominee.

In a present-day Britain where the British Empire never existed, wives and mothers strive for deliverance in a novel about oppression, autonomy, and family secrets by the author of The Peacekeeper.

What if Europe had never colonized the world? It is a world that never had overseas empires, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Protestant Reformation. There is, however, in an obscure island nation called England, a woman running for her life.

Marie, Duchess of Suffolk, has no choice. In this society, women are a reproductive commodity. Marriage is the only available occupation. And barren wives like Marie are expendable trade. After absconding with the family jewels, Marie fakes her own death and seeks a life outside the confines of her family and her marriage. She’s looking for freedom but finds even more: an underground network of women like her, her estranged sister, and a greater mission to discover the truth behind their mother’s inexplicable death.

Hunted and chased across borders by those she fled, Marie has stolen more than the family jewels. She is escaping with secrets. And all that matters now, no matter the risk, is stealing freedom.

©2023 Brooke Blanchard Tabshouri. (P)2023 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“[A] dystopian thrill ride.”—Publishers Weekly

“I have never read a book as transformative, sharp, fun, genuinely page-turning and transgressively Indigenous as B.L. Blanchard's The Mother. This is Indigenous Futurism at its absolute best.”—Erika T Wurth, author of Whitehorse

Cannot stop listening!

The narrator is great, and I cannot put the book down - so to speak. I love the characters but the history interspersed is fascinating.

I really wanted to like this, but I can't

First of all, the narration is superb. But, while I really enjoyed The Peacekeeper (although some parts of it were a bit on the nose), The Mother is so ridiculous I can't keep on reading.

In Blanchard's The Good Lands, anything even remotely European is an over the top caricature of the modern day, and least charitable, interpretation of European vice, while anything non-European is treated as gloriously empowering and in line with modern leftist ideals; the trope of the noble savage taken to the extreme.

The Peacekeeper does attempt to explore some fascinating possibilities of what some interesting aspects of different Native American cultures might look like projected into modern times, but the author does the exact opposite in this novel.

Instead of taking a potentially interesting look at what unique aspects of England, or Europe, might have looked like without the reformation or large overseas empires, we get a fairly lazy attempt to draft off of The Handmaid's Tale. Here where men in an otherwise backwater and impoverished nation, which doesn't have a consistent power grid, somehow simultaneously pioneer the technology for tracking wives via surgically implanted tracking devices. Only fighting with France comes close to being as much a concern for the English upper class as making sure women are carefully controlled and treated as either breeding mares or roughly groped any chance a man gets the opportunity.

I was so interested in more nuanced and interesting explorations of concepts found in The Peacekeeper, but I was incredibly disappointed. I actually do hope the author tries again, but maybe this time with a little bit less of an overt attempt to push a specific American political narrative.

Engaging story.

There may be some spoilers here so beware. The writing is excellent and the story moves along in a compelling manner. The alternative history of The Peacekeeper is revisited. But there is no other connection between the books and that is a loss. Bringing characters together from both books would have been fascinating.

This is self standing. We don’t quite get the world building here that we get in the first book. It’s a world. Very Handmaid’s Tale. But we don’t know why. How did this happen? Clearly the author isn’t positing that NOT colonizing led to this horrible outcome. That’s against the obvious original premise of lost opportunity.

I think we needed more of the opposition. Of the rebel women that ran the black market network. And more of the title character. Her story was hinted at but ultimately untold.

This was a good tale and good narration but given the talent it leaves you wishing for the masterpiece it could have been.